Machiavelli's report and description of this and subsequent embassies to this prince, shows his undisguised admiration for the courage and cunning of Caesar, who was a master in the application of the principles afterwards exposed in such a skillful and uncompromising manner by Machiavelli in his _Prince_.
The limits of this introduction will not permit us to follow with any detail the many important duties with which he was charged by his native state, all of which he fulfilled with the utmost fidelity and with consummate skill.

When, after the battle of Ravenna in 1512 the holy league determined upon the downfall of Pier Soderini, Gonfaloniere of the Florentine Republic, and the restoration of the Medici, the efforts of Machiavelli, who was an ardent republican, were in vain; the troops he had helped to organize fled before the Spaniards and the Medici were returned to power.

Machiavelli attempted to conciliate his new masters, but he was deprived of his office, and being accused in the following year of participation in the conspiracy of Boccoli and Capponi, he was imprisoned and tortured, though afterward set at liberty by Pope Leo X.He now retired to a small estate near San Casciano, seven miles from Florence.

Here he devoted himself to political and historical studies, and though apparently retired from public life, his letters show the deep and passionate interest he took in the political vicissitudes through which Italy was then passing, and in all of which the singleness of purpose with which he continued to advance his native Florence, is clearly manifested.

It was during his retirement upon his little estate at San Casciano that Machiavelli wrote _The Prince_, the most famous of all his writings, and here also he had begun a much more extensive work, his _Discourses on the Decades of Livy_, which continued to occupy him for several years.